Its a common occurrence for families to take in poor girls to do house work in exchange for food and lodging. And with the insidious nature of Brazilian racism, they will pretend that she is part of the family. They might even take her on vacations (to work, of course). If you grow up with this mentality it might even be hard for you to see the injustice. Brazil abolished slavery in 1888, the last country in the Americas to do so, decades after its neighbours. The slaves never got compensation but their owners did.
I will say it was common up to the end of 70s and somewhat into the 80s.
Common here I don't mean that every single person would have a "slave child" at home but you'd know someone or someone that knew someone who did it.
I am not saying it justify this horrible behaviour, but mostly as to say how much worse it could get.
Some would just be "Cinderella" style abuse, but other would be physically and sexually abused.
Some reform of policies around de 90s cleared much of the evil practice.
I think by today standards, 99% of people knowing this would have denounced this much earlier. The fact it did not happen in this case is because this family is related to a powerful politician of the region.
Compensation they offer is too little and too disrespectful. It is basically 3 USD a week for the past half decade of forced work relationship.
First, it would need to be at least 100x more than that and it would need to put this rubbish in form of people into jail for the rest of their lives.
I was repeatedly told in school that Brazil was the last country to abolish slavery, only to find out recently that places like UAE had not abolished slavery until 1967.
Most people I talk to don’t know that 80% of Russians were slaves until their emancipation in 1861, as well as a significant amount of Ukrainians, Belarusians, Latvians and Estonians. There were no reparations paid, in fact they had to continue working for free for generations to pay bankers for the same land they have been enslaved for. Then just after the former serfs finally paid their “debt” the Bolsheviks came and took it
They took the slavery / serf distinction seriously in the Slavic world. While the distinctions might have mattered in the 1800s, by any modern-slavery standard the serfs were slaves, as you rightly say.
Whatever we might now think with hindsight of the communist revolution in Russia, if ever there was a country primed for the peasants to rise up against the ruling class, it was Russia.
Russia might have been a land of art, music, dance and literature, but you were pretty fucked if you weren't in the 20%.
Not just Russia, the Kingdom of Hungary (which contained large parts of Central Europe) abolished serfdom only in 1848 (the Serfdom Patent of 1781 was not really respected in the hungarian part of Austrian Empire until then).
As if they stopped... The whole middle east is a shit show in that regard.
And North Korea continues to show that literally nobody cares, really. Because if they did, at least that would've been prevent- or at least stopable with some concessions to China. The North Korean people would've at least been treated as humans if they became part of China and the NK dictator along with the whole government be executed.
I’m sorry but the current NK regime and the Kim family consolidating power is in large part due to American aggression indochina. The Korean War was more or less genocide on the part of the Americans and history would be different without Douglas MacArthur…
That's just fake history. The US didn't start the Korean war, they helped SK stand free of the oppression of the seriously evil NK government.
China then interfered because they didn't want a US aligned country at their border.
However there have been decades since the affair settled - and I stand by my opinion that if the US and by extension NATO cares whatsoever, they'd have just told China "we won't interfere as long as you free NK citizens into free people".
It would've not been perfect at all, but at least the horrendous reality they are in would've been prevented.
That's also somewhat fake history. The half of Korea under Syngman Rhee was almost as bad as the other half under Kim Il Sung, it's just that Rhee was "our son of a bitch" to quote Roosevelt while Kim was Stalin's son of a bitch. Rhee was just as keen to unite Korea using American blood as Kim was using Chinese blood.
> Slavery in the Arab world is a benign institution. Slaves are rarely used for industrial or agricultural labor. They are often treated as members of the family. Bright young slaves are educated and given positions of trust and are eventually freed. Mohammed Surur, the former Minister of Finance of Saudi Arabia, was born a slave. Two managers of one of Jidda's principal hotels were once slaves.
A family member stayed in a hotel in Dubai recently and on returning said how incredible the staff were and willing they were to help them, and my response was "no shit"
I went once. It feels like Disney Land but for the wealthy. I'll never go back, and I actually regret going to be honest. It's disgusting and it's right out in the open.
I was shocked to read how late even several prominent European countries abolished it. Most northern US states abolished slavery even before Britain, France, Portugal, and (especially) Spain did.
Serfdom wasn't legally abolished in Russia until 1861. Slavery was technically abolished in the late 1700s, but in some areas serfs were still bought and sold like chattel until the end of serfdom.
The Ottoman Empire legally abolished slavery in the 1880s, but there was still illicit yet tolerated slavery in Turkey into the 1930s.
I think in some areas of the Sahel chattel slavery may still exist as a practical matter. Mauritania didn't legally abolish chattel slavery until 1981, for example, but as in other areas it can take decades for reality to match the law, given the laws were often changed under international pressure rather than reflecting any change to the domestic social order.
Serfdom continued in practice in Russia for decades and often serfs became indebted to the landowners in a form of financial bondage that pretty much lasted until the Russian revolution, where...well things didn't get much better for them.
The fact that serfdom de-facto remained is one of the primary reasons Russia's industrialization lagged the rest of Europe for so long as factories didn't get the initial cheap labour. It was only finally fully picking up steam (pun not intended) when WW1 broke out.
> serfs became indebted to the landowners in a form of financial bondage that pretty much lasted until the Russian revolution, where...well things didn't get much better for them.
Exactly. Bolsheviks just changed the name from "serfdom" to "collective farms". Mandatory membership where members were not allowed an ID that enabled them to move inside the country and therefore were bound to the farm. The practice continued until the late 1970s.
And, today, in the whole middle east everyone, from governments to individual families, keep getting "embarassed" by having it turn that that they're "holding servants". And then it happens again. And again. And again. Daesh/IS "brought back" slavery (which is one reason bringing back terror brides, some of whom exploited slaves while in the middle east, is such a judicial nightmare. What do you do with a legally Australian girl, now a mother of 4, who lived for 2 years in Iraq, bought and sold slaves, exploited some them to "run the household", and killed/worked to death one of them?)
Slavery is abolished everywhere in the middle east ("except" Daesh/islamic state), and yet this keeps happening. Example after example after example:
Oh and the royal families keep getting caught in "even more embarrassing" incidents.
Here is Saudi Arabia having a royal murder a slave for perceived insults, then forcing UK governments to allow and forgive the murder (by taking nationals hostage then organizing a "prisoner swap")
Or Iranian and Iraqi imams and mullahs selling children, girls, but apparently even including the occasional boy, into child prostitution, functioning as pimps and exploiters:
Frankly, these days it seems to be quite normal for countries to just sign whatever treaty anyone wants signed ... and just ignore it. Vilifying anyone calling them out on it as culturally insensitive and in all cases ignoring them.
The abolition of slavery in the US is unfortunately a more complicated story than most people are aware.
The 13th amendment removed the legal concept of slavery (except for convicts) but it was still not a crime to do slavery. Slavery changed shape many times over the years since the civil war (usually involving convicting black people under sham crimes and then selling them as debt slaves or forcing them to sign contracts that rendered them slaves under threat of being convicted for said sham crimes) and can only reasonably be said to have actually ended in the US after Pearl Harbour when concerns that it would be used as enemy propaganda caused the Justice Department to properly prosecute slave owners (see Circular 3591[1]).
The last chattel slave in the US was Alfred Irving[2] and he was released in late 1942. He was kept in chains and was permanently disfigured due to constant physical abuse from his owners. He died in 1960.
[3] is a very comprehensive video essay about the topic.
The vast majority of slaves went to the New World, so that's where most of its effects were felt. Of the 12.5M people kidnapped from Africa, only ~9000 went to the Old World. It just wasn't as obvious of a problem in Europe itself.
An interesting side-effect of this is that a lot of European countries have two relevant dates: the first being the banning of slave trade, the second being the banning of slavery. For example, the UK prohibited any involvement in the Atlantic slave trade in 1807, but slavery in the UK itself was only abolished in 1833.
Oh. Yeah I thought it was slang language use but it seems like it is used for adults too over the board. I mainly wanted to point out that adults were victims also.
You'd be shocked how much of our "friends" in MENA still have legal slavery for non citizens. When an employer can legally confiscate someone's passport and one can only leave the country with their authorization, it is slavery.
I have no idea why we in the west consider that normal and look the other way... What am I saying, I know, oil & VC money...
Some of them also bring their Filipino, India, Nepali, or African slave maids in Europe and everybody looks the other way, they have too much money to be criticized...
They are so brazen about slavery they routinely sell their slaves on Instagram or Facebook ads, with copies such as "doesn't need much food","will sleep on the floor", "will work 20 hours a day"...
> "African worker, clean and smiley," said one listing. Another: "Nepalese who dares to ask for a day off."
> When speaking to the sellers, the undercover team frequently heard racist language. "Indians are the dirtiest," said one, describing a woman being advertised.
They are dehumanized at first place, but the level of racism in these places, on top of all that is shocking...
> When an employer can confiscate someone's passport and one can only leave the country with their authorization, it is slavery.
This happens in Europe as well.
It is not legal, but it is the only way the Scandinavian berry market works at all. You don’t even need a huge market for this to be allowed to happen. You just need _a_ market and workers that are desperate enough to be tricked.
On a side note: be VERY suspicious if you ever come across a situation, where person identified by a passport, does not keep (more exactly: control) it themselves. This is a big red flag you've encountered some sort of exploitative (and possibly illegal) situation. Please remember!
Quoting from my own passport:
"The bearer of this passport may pass it to a third party only if there is a statutory obligation to do so".
Denying the freedom of an employee to end a work relation with their employer & leave, does not pass that bar.
When visiting Egypt, the hotel took control of all the guests passport and only returned them at departure date. It is not the same as work relation, obviously, but I wonder how common that practice is in other tourist destinations.
Passport confiscation is a common sign of modern slavery.
"he was lured in with the false promise of a well-paid job in the UK"
"The gang confiscated the passports of all their victims"
It's not legal. There are definitions of "Modern Slavery" and descriptions of the practices and warning signs because it is still an issue in contemporary times, including in Europe.
No, it's real. Every year, there are several news articles about berry pickers being abused, at least here in Sweden (not sure about the other Scandinavian countries). Here's [0] just ONE of the myriad of articles I could find, but there are so, so, so many more (and even worse ones) [1].
Similar situation in Finland. There have only recently been some consequences for the berry companies and reforms are underway. The pickers would come mainly from Thailand with tourist visas. This year a majority of the visas have been denied and the berry companies are throwing tantrums.
They've been engaging in illegal price-fixing, too.
> Most northern US states abolished slavery even before Britain, France, Portugal, and (especially) Spain did
Sort of. France and England abolished slavery within their own territories before the US states did, but it did not extend to their colonies until later. France banned slavery within its home territory back in the 1300s (Free Soil Principle), but continued with slavery through its "Code Noir" (Black Code) in its colonies, where slavery was not permanently abolished until 1848 (it was abolished at the time of the French Revolution but then reinstated by Napoleon). England abolished slavery at home in the mid 1700s but not in its colonies until 1834.
(Like the US North, England and France had very small populations of Africans/others, so it was relatively painless and easy to ban slavery there, while continuing to accept slavery "elsewhere". For the US North "elsewhere" was the South, for England and France it was their colonies. Same principle though.)
Along the same lines, slavery of Catholics was forbidden in Europe all the way back in the Middle Ages. So it was acknowledged to be something bad, that Christians should not do to each other. But slavery of "infidels", heathen/pagan/Muslims/etc., was OK - and not only okay but sanctioned by Romanus Pontifex in the 1400s granting Portugal the authority to enslave "pagans" (basically all non-Europeans) along the coast of Africa. (Incidentally, as some Africans converted to Christianity, this posed a problem (they were no longer pagan and couldn't be enslaved), and so eventually it shifted to being about race and skin color rather than religion.)
I wonder if this position was taken from the Muslim slaver behavior who had been conquering/enslaving Christians for quite a while at that point. Especially as Spain was being taken back from Muslim colonizers at that time, and you have lands that had been under Muslim practices (enslaving non-muslims) now having the roles reversed but perhaps the engrained Islamic thought (only enslave non-believers) entrenched.
"Jarvious Cotton cannot vote. Like his father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and great-great-grandfather, he has been denied the right to participate in our electoral democracy"
Alas, the "kids for cash" scandal was such a big news event that it dominates the results for any search you'd do on the subject of private prison corruption, but it's hardly the only example.
It's possible that you're genuine in your confusion here; it is, however very hard for me to believe that there are people who genuinely don't understand that when the state spends money it -goes somewhere-.
The state as a whole does not have a financial motivation.
The interests of the criminal justice system on the other hand is heavily financially benefited from the current state of affairs. More incarcerations means more judges, more lawyers, more job security.
Moves to correct this are labeled as “soft of crime” and surely my opponent Congresswoman Y isn’t pro crime?
I wasn't claiming there was a financial motivation one way or the other simply stating the actors who do turn a profit with regards to the US prison system.
The explosion of incarceration and the private prisons resulting from that largely come from "the war on drugs". The book The New Jim Crow is pretty good if you're interested in the topic.
i.e. its not a good motivation to increase the number of prisoners (even if one looses less money per prisoner, more prisoners will mean more loss), but it does motivate investigating ways on how one can minimize the loss on individual prisoners.
"What's the financial motivation for the state" is way too blinkered and makes at least 2 different false assumptions. There are other motivations besides financial, and it doesn't have to be the state's own motivation for the state to end up doing something.
Countless government policies and programs exist which give no legitimate benefit to the state or the people, no legitimate motivation, financial or otherwise, yet they exist anyway because they do benefit and motivate someone, financially or otherwise, who has some mechanism of influence to cause it to happen.
This is almost like asking "Why would anyone do something bad?" Gosh golly why indeed? 517,000 reasons and 124 new ones every day.
Relevant in that the directly upthread poster argued there was “zero financial motivation for the state for prevention or rehab or any other activities to reduce imprisonment rates”, which I claim is incorrect.
I get how you could read it that way, and of course the state as the thing that is collecting taxes and paying whatever does not profit.
and the state as all citizens, including those affected by gang and drug related violence also would benefit from dong things differently.
it's those who benefit off the current prison labor system who lobby to keep it running, and they make it seem "natural" and "without alternatives"...
and "the state" (as the tax collecting entity) pays for the prisons and the inmates while the labor "providing" companies benefit off the labor.
it's a very very clever system.
enslavement without being called such.
and I agree, no, "the state" (as the totality of citizens) doesn't benefit.
only "the state" as the entity that's controlled by lobbyists and _pretends_ being by the people, for the people, that has no motivation to change this.
Prisoners are not slaves, because they are not the property of the prison or any other entity. It's called involuntary servitude. I'm sure the people affected do not care about the distinction, but words matter.
It's also trivially easy to not end up in involuntary servitude.
> It's also trivially easy to not end up in involuntary servitude.
Look, you're not entirely wrong. But you're not entirely right, either.
In some states, the prisons are privately run and the prison labour is part of the profit motive. They have no incentive to rehabilitate and the states with these "programs" have some of the highest recidivism rates in the USA.
That also ignores the fact that some people are born into situations that make it far harder to live a "legit" life than others, and I'm not even talking about historical racism as part of that equation (which certainly does contribute).
I'm also NOT saying that prisoners shouldn't be made to work, but it should be outside of a system designed to exploit them.
Stupid people also assume there are not exceptions to every rule. But you can't build your systems (or your arguments) around edge cases, because that would be ignoring the vast majority of use cases.
I suppose using this logic, murder is legal, because of self defense. Theft is legal because of tax laws.
Prisoners aren't 'slaves'. They are being punished for crimes they committed. Very dofferent than being born into it and bought/sold to the highest bidder.
Read the Constitution. The 13th amendment that “abolished” slavery also explicitly reserved the right for the government to keep prisoners as slaves:
AMENDMENT XIII
Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
If someone is abducted against their will and forced to do work without (fair) compensation and without being allowed to exercise their human rights, is that person not a slave because they were neither born into it nor bought or sold?
"Abduction against their will" is something that happens when a person is arrested. If you are done for crime I don't think freedoms apply to you anymore.
> they will pretend that she is part of the family
Wasn't there some mild scandal a decade or so ago where wealthy white American families would adopt kids from Africa or Mexico, only to force them to do housework the whole time?
Well, it's classed as child abuse and the perpetrators ("parents") were punished harshly. So pretty bad, but not remotely the same thing as what happens in the middle east or north Africa.
If you found that movie interesting, check out The Second Mother (Que Horas ela Volta?) which is a Brazilian movie about a maid and her relationship with the middle class family that employs her.
I was talking to a doctor who went to medical school in Brazil and said it was normal for upper-middle class people to have a live-in domestic servant. Many of the floorplans for condos or houses include a servants quarters. They were telling me theirs cost around $12 USD a day which is not a bad deal.
This is true in Singapore and Malaysia, as well, where Filipino or Indonesian cooks and housekeepers are extremely common, as are separate entrances--typically into the kitchen. In Malaysia there's an odd situation, the reverse of the dynamic in the US, where Indonesian servant immigration is encouraged as a way to grow the Muslim population and help diminish the political power of Chinese-Malaysians and Indian-Malaysians.
> This is true in Singapore and Malaysia, as well, where Filipino or Indonesian cooks and housekeepers are extremely common, as are separate entrances--typically into the kitchen.
Live in housekeepers are very common indeed in Singapore. However, majority of Singapore lives in Housing Development Board flats that do not have any separate entrance into kitchen.
I am a brazilian doctor. Yeah, richer people are very likely to hire staff to manage their homes. It's not a rule, but it's not rare for them to live in the house they work at. This is common enough to show up as a trope in popular telenovelas.
I've yet to uncover a case of literal slavery like TFA though. One could argue the workers aren't getting paid enough and I'd agree, but the workers are getting paid.
If you pay minimum wage (about US$300) it would be about that per working day. Increasingly, cleaners are working per diem because they earn a lot more (about US$40 a day, but this varies a lot by region).
I grew up with servants (in Subsaharan Africa and Morocco).
However, they were paid (I have no idea whether it was a good wage, or not), and had pretty decent quarters (in Morocco). My parents were pretty kind, fairly liberal, people. I would be quite surprised (and shocked) if they took advantage of the servants. I know that my mother made damn sure that I had respect for poor folks.
Those things are a symptom of an undeveloped economy. It harkens back to a time of less development where there were more hands than jobs and much of the labor was manual. Not to excuse the practice in modern times but go back a few generations and that was the reality of the world -everywhere.
It's a symptom of inequality. It will start happening more and more even in the first world if inequality isn't tackled and wealth continues to concentrate.
Logically-speaking, poverty can't exist without inequality. It's a condition of "want" that requires others to "have".
Practically-speaking, inequality is insidious because it enables violations of rights and unjust denial of opportunity even when poverty has been eradicated. Cold comfort, to the middle-class family of people mowed down by a rich motorist who faces negligible jail time because the money they can spend on a lawyer is outside the scope of what the legal system is built to handle.
There's poverty without inequality. In some primitive tribes everyone was poor. When natural adverse conditions hit some regions, also poverty was widespread.
That the justice can be persuaded in a certain direction with money is a weakness of the system. I don't think you would consider equal and just that every person could influence justice. The problem is the justice system.
If everyone is poor, there's no poverty, just an ubiquitous state of subsistence. Poverty is always relative to some existing state of abundance.
>That the justice can be persuaded in a certain direction with money is a weakness of the system
It's a weakness of any system with overbearing inequality. Equal societies don't face this issue to the same extent because those wronged can mount an equal defense or offense as those doing the wrong, at which point righteousness should prevail.
You redefined the word poverty there, that's not the common or dictionary definition.
Even with wealth equality, as long as there's scarcity, some people would try to gain advantages over others with means different than money: e.g advantageous connections with others, deception, etc.
There's corruption among poor people, and rich people also steal from other rich people.
An utopic idea of equality blocks the capacity of observing how things work.
No. Poverty is not relative to what others have. Poverty is relative to baseline needs. So poverty absolutely can exist without inequality.
Inequality has no moral characteristics. It is not "insidious." The fact that disparate effort and disparate circumstance lead to disparate outcomes is just that; a simple cold fact.
That some people use their power or wealth to take advantage of others is a moral issue. But again, this is orthogonal to disparity of outcome. Or do you claim poor people never steal from other poor people, or that rich people never steal from other rich people?
That's incorrect. The baseline need that poverty is calculated relative to is itself calculated relative to local conditions. Because inequality drives those local conditions, poverty cannot exist without it.
Your post is proof of the insidiousness of inequality. It allows for outcomes to be warped by the presence or lack of aggregated capital, without presenting a direct attack on outcomes. As long as you are able to limit the contextual scope, you are able to claim a "just world", even when clear injustice is extant.
It is then important to insist that the scope stay broad enough to involve all related implications.
"Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely." This suggests that there is a functional relationship between the size of power imbalances and the amount of corruption that exists. It is not that some people use their power or wealth to take advantage of others; it is that inordinate power and wealth ensures that abuses will occur.
> Because inequality drives those local conditions...
That is not in evidence. You may be thinking of inflationary pressures causing the poverty income level to be adjusted upward. This is not a result of income inequality. It is a result of supply and demand.
> "Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely."
That is an aphorism, not a universal truth, and holds zero moral weight. You may be judged as corrupt by what you do, not by what you have.
> ...inordinate power and wealth ensures that abuses will occur.
No. This is envy as evidence. It doesn't work that way. Your use of the word "inordinate" is also meaningless from an economic or policy stance. Who decides what is inordinate? What qualifies a level as inordinate?
There is only one equilibrium state with full equality: vacuum. In an economic sense this is where zero exchange of value occurs. It is system-death.
In a just world, you keep what you earn. You reap what you sow. When someone powerful steps out of line you punish them. If they do not, there is no reason to punish them. Pre-punishment because "they probably will" is propaganda from the dictator. We don't want that.
The terrible labor laws exist because of the inequality. The people with servants write the laws and, in their magnaminity, don't let the servants vote.
Inequality is a big factor. Story says the woman in this case felt she was compensated. Like feeling 'lucky' to enjoy (some) perks of living in a rich household. If that family had been as poor as her (or her mother), that stops being true. Then it becomes hard to keep a slave from walking away without resorting to violence.
Another big factor is the victim simply not knowing any better. Not being able to read might have helped with that (and I'd guess she probably wasn't allowed a phone, to keep her isolated from outside).
Point is there's a lot of space between "whips & chains" and "paying below minimum wage". Unfortunately some people are really good at exploiting that space.
Yes poverty is a factor. But inequality too - it helps to create [the powerless vs the powerful] situations. Even if those on the bottom may not qualify as poor.
> Education and a society's culture are certainly important too.
There's is poor people who exploit other poor people. Poor people that sends children to work for example. Only the rich can exploit? You are not using the definition of exploitation from the dictionaries. A stronger or armed person has a power differential with a weaker person. A smarter and less smart person too.
So, exploitation doesn't seem to be related exclusively to wealth inequality. It's a moral thing, not a matter of wealth differences.
A simple narrative of "us-good VS them-bad" is reductionistic.
The hallmark of developed countries is that they're even, mostly egalitarian and developed everywhere.
The hallmark of developing or underdeveloped countries is precisely the staggering levels of inequality.
Not everyone is poor in a developing/underdeveloped country. Quite a few people there live lives that would make upper middle classes in developed countries blush. Life "just" sucks for the majority of people there.
Would you say USA is a developed country, considering for example Los Angeles slums? And there's a bigger inequality between Elon musk and a well paid software developer than between a poor person in a developing country and a rich politician from that country.
probably for both.. don't forget it includes an air conditioned place to live, food and internet plus a salary. In exchange they take care of domestic needs (cooking, shopping, house keeping)
This used to be quite common in Chile as well. I don't think it's that prevalent anymore, but it was very interesting to see the synergy some families built after decades of cohabiting with a "service person" (don't really know what word to use). I met a lot of people that widely regarded their service lady as a mother, they were pretty much raised with them around, so the bonds run deep. I have no doubt some times the compensation might not exactly be the best, but I have met quite a lot of people that are well happy with this arrangement.
The median income in brazil is 10X lower than USA. So $12 a day -> $120 a day. That's similar to what someone in the US at the bottom of the economic ladder might earn. We have the same thing, it's just that Americans want to have servants but don't want to see them, so there's an app barrier between you and the poor. Someone cooks your food, someone else delivers your food, someone cleans your hotel room, but Americans prefer not to have to ever learn their names or talk to them. Is that really better?
Unlike when you use an app, for the most part, because we're not psychopaths, living with someone every day for months or years causes us to feel a great affinity and care towards them.
I live in a developing country. Some people treat their live-in staff badly. But for many others, this is not the case.
Imagine you are a high-earner and hard worker and so you and your wife get a live-in nanny to assist with childrearing duties. Often, two or three decades later, the live-in nanny is ready to retire, but your children (whom you love) have come to see her as a member of the family, or even as a second mother. Surely you also do. How can you live with someone for 20-30 years and not care about them? You might thus often take care of her for the rest of her life, even though she has her own savings.
(No, I do not have live-in house staff. But I've had the same maid for 7 years and she knows she can come to me if she needs anything.)
How one treats someone else is probably mostly just a reflection of the individual. But it's harder to disregard someone's humanity when they live in your house and you've know them for years.
This is probably the same line of thought the families involved in the story have had.
Yet, the end result is still quite similar to slavery. Why do you suppose the servants stay, instead of living a life of their own? I think you’ll find the answer there.
There is a world of difference between paying someone who is free to leave, and basically fake adopting a child who you keep uneducated so that they don’t even know how to leave while forcing them to work without any pay.
Are you saying if they were simply paid slightly more money and forced to seek their own food and shelter in whatever abject conditions they could afford, like minimum-wage and rural workers in most first-world countries, they would be better off? Or do you have more insightful suggestions? “Pay more” is always the easy answer people go with, especially while not wanting to pay more for anything, so I’m excited to hear a fresh and unique take on poverty.
I'd say certainly not. The key aspect of the story is that the woman entered in service of the family as a very young child. That makes all the difference.
Thanks for your perspective. I do wonder if this arrangement is usually not as bad as some people are implying. Though on the other hand, the line between this sort of thing and something that can reasonably be called slavery can be quite fuzzy.
The practice of live-in maids has been somewhat common throughout the world up until WWI and into WWII. Well-to-do families would taken in boys and girls from poor families and use them for house and yard work. It wasn’t slavery, or even indentured servitudes, but it did take opportunity of their misfortune. Aristocrats and well to dos would take girls and boys mostly from the less educated countryside or from war-torn areas of the rest of Europe and use them as cheap labor. Some would stay on and some would go off to seek better future outside those families. It was somewhat symbiotic the poor kids (and their families) needed the money and the wealthy could show off they had money to spend on domestic help.
My wife's family were wealthy Chinese near Hong Kong. Her grandmother took in a poor girl as a servant. She was part of the family but also basically a slave. The grandmother arranged her marriage when the girl was older. We met the girls granddaughter when we visited china - she was a new college student. The two families still think of themselves as related.
Almost same story (except china), my grandmother lost her parents very young. A family took her in and she worked for them until 20 years old or something then she got married.
In cases like this, it’s likely the victim defended the family, and it made it impossible to classify the crime as slavery if she said she was free to leave but “was afraid of the violence outside”, which the article mentioned. It sounds ridiculous but in any court, if you can’t prove something beyond doubt, you cannot punish, which I think is why they ended up with that arrangement.
But being so afraid that you have never been outside unless accompanied by your bosses would be pathological in any other case.
Also, what I said was "ridiculous" was the jury's conclusion, not going outside.
Pathological, yes, but it doesn't necessarily mean that this fear was instilled by the family as a way to keep her trapped.
Most people in Brazil are so used with the precautions that they have to take to deal with urban violence, they don't get to realize that they are the ones living in their own prisons. I have family members in Rio de Janeiro who get panic attacks at the thought of going anywhere by themselves. I've met grown-up, educated, independent people in college who wouldn't dare to do anything outside of the home <-> campus itinerary on their own.
Minimum wage is about US$300, which would make about US$220k total (you get about 13.3 salaries per year), plus fines and overtime. They'll have to pay social security too. It seems to me that the case doesn't include the labour part of the situation. That might be a separate case.
> “The signing of this agreement does not rule out the possibility that the worker may pursue individual claims through the courts,” the statement added.
systemic racism is a thing, bet you there are judges, lawyers, etc that have the same thing going on. many in power do and thus are sympathetic to such causes. it's hard to viciously go after what you are guilt of.
You are acting like the case is that the girl was kidnapped or taken from their family against their will. Barring extraordinary circumstances, this is far from the truth here. More likely than not, this is the case of some poor family that couldn't take care of the girl and gave her away.
It is a horrible arrangement, and she should be given a lot more than what she is getting (at the very least, she should be given backpay + pension equivalent to the market rate of her work for all these years), but to treat this case as some sadistic family keeping someone in captivity is overreacting.
If it was as bad as you are claiming it to be, she wouldn't stay with the family before the investigation, yet everyone deemed better to let her stay with the family even after the sentence was given.
Maybe this is a sensitive topic for you, but try not reading more into the article than it's there. The decision was recommended by the social workers.
No it's not. I can see how it's recommended. It's the best possible decision for the victim. But the scale of the crime is still horrible.
I wouldn't pin judgement on someone elses recommendation nor would I say them being a social worker validates it even more than say some rando guy on the internet. Judge the facts.
Her life was ruined. That is huge. It is an epic crime. Not a mild thing.
Oh wow, I didn't realize this was already 9 years old. One of the essays of all time.
Certainly provides some perspective on why Brazil might let that woman stay with the family that enslaved her. Granted, Lola's case is unique because she was taken halfway around the world and was an undocumented immigrant for decades. It sounds like that's not the case for this woman in Brazil, but there's a lot we don't know.
I've seen what might be a similar social dynamic in very long, but abusive marriages in the US. A person can understand intellectually that they could have a better life elsewhere, but this has been their life for so long that conceiving of what that life might be like is impossible, or terrifying at best. I resent the abuser no less, but it's hard to know what to make of all of it.
Those of us that soldered wires, wrote custom drivers for esoteric hardware, and played with crazy things in the garage recognize that social systems are hackable too.
Submitter here. As per HN guidelines: "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity".
This playing out across generations of the family that kept her, the woman 'rescued' but staying with them for the time being, the social context, income levels, how to keep a slave from leaving in today's ultra-connected world, the low $ damages mentioned, relation with other modern forms of slavery...
Welcome to HN! You’ll find that a lot of the readers and commenters here don’t view technology as an isolated field, that it interconnects with all sorts of other systems—sociology, politics, entertainment, manufacturing, business, and so on.
Welcome to Hacker News. Such submissions are mostly not on-topic according to the HN guidelines linked at the bottom of the page but there are persistent activist users who try to drag off-topic social issues onto Hacker News when the opportunity presents itself under the thin pretext that "everything is political". Most such submissions don't have the momentum to reach the HN front page but occasionally one does.
The joke's on them; it likely erodes support for their causes.
at the bottom of the page there is guidelines and FAQ
they also give good indication on how to handle topics that don't tickle your personal preferences (for "interesting" or "curious"): silently ignore them
especially if interest is the guidance on downvoting and flagging. the sorting is not according to your personal preferences, as in "social media", but according to the hn hive think. thus negative voting indicates "anti-curious", "anti-conversation", not dislike.
Yup, my mom and her sisters were all sent off to work on family houses when they were about 10 - 12. They were born in the country side, and my grandpa didn't care for them at all.
Yes. She left that house to work on a nursery home with the nuns. Then on a supermarket, I think. Then my father knocked her up at the age of 20. Interesting woman.
I see a lot of comments claiming that slavery was abolished. It was not, we just made the transition to another form of slavery, one where most people think they are free. In reality, they work every day while most of their earnings are taken from them by force every month ('taxation'). The well known slave Frederik Douglas was one of the first examples of this. Douglas made a deal with his master to do whatever he liked as long as he gave his master a cut. The same dynamic is now implemented worldwide. Watch the movie Jones Plantation.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt26964727/
Well, taxation is not “most of your earnings.” Not even remotely close. If we’re talking theft, maybe look at the companies reaping profits off your labor without sharing it.
I think your definition of slavery is highly insulting. Slavery is bad not because two people agree to have this profit sharing scheme as you seem to be implying.
Slavery is evil because one person is nearly fully and entirely controlling another person’s entire life, usually for the “owner’s” gain, without the other person’s consent.
Claiming (twice) that taxation takes most of your earnings is not the same as proving it. We didn't believe you the first time, and we don't believe you the second. Got any actual evidence?
I dunno about proving, but 20% income tax + 20% vat + property taxes + estate tax + the various extra taxed thing like gas etc, and you're easily over half.
She will re receive a compensation of 50.000 reais.
Which on every, with current exchange rate should be about 3 USD per week of work.
One can't get a better bargain for a slave!
> whether the woman desires to be "rescued" or wants changes in the way she lives now
Here’s the thing: you can’t keep someone isolated for 55 years, working them without pay—regardless of whether the victim thinks that they want it or not.
Hot take: As bad as this is, I wonder if it would be kinder to leave her with the family for the rest of her life.
This lady is in her 60s, does she even know any other way to even live? Life with that family may be better than whatever Brazil's equivalent of welfare shelters are.
Seems like that may have been why the case workers left her with that family for now.
The problem that often the victims also have not educated, have no worldly experience, often have no idea about money handeling beyond small items.
This can result in them being exploited again by even more unscrupulous people. The articles clearly mentioned how difficult these cases are to deal with. While they do not go into detail, the above is why.
Its very easy to gain peoples trust when they have no sense of normal anymore, and can you sign this paper, o, we need to go to a friendly notary to help with it. and before you know it, the people just handed over their apartment / or whatever.
There are a lot of good people with will want to help but it only takes one rotten apple to destroy peoples live again. Recently in Europe there was a case of a helper that took elderly their IDs and helped herself to their money. She made 100s of victims. Now imaging that type of person with somebody who probably did not have any proper education and normal independent life experiences that we all had the luxury of having.
In a ideal world, we have proper state funded solutions, with proper oversight to help people integrate into society. Reality is that if any services exist, they are underfunded, often lacking oversight and people fall into the often chasm of cracks.
These type of stories are never clean white and black, but a mix of gray sludge, where we all hope for the perfect ideal solution but often there are not many options. And naivety tend to often do more harm then good.
I'm pretty sure there's a reason we frown on people hiring servants in general, such as a driver or a housemaid. It's far too similar to slavery for anyone's comfort
"Statistics suggest that Maria was undoubtedly poor and, most likely, Black."
That is a new way of reporting news, that journalist Gortázar seems to have invented here. When you don't know anything about the victim, just make something up from "statistics".
Where else can we apply this technique?
"Maria entered their lives around 1971 — the year Henry Kissinger visited China, John Lennon wrote Imagine, and Mexico hosted the first Women’s World Cup."
Good to know.
"The traditional maid’s room is gradually disappearing in Brazil, but buildings with separate social and service elevators — for domestic workers, visiting technicians, neighbors with dogs, or residents carrying groceries — remain commonplace."
Those are for separating workers carrying broken dusty floor tiles or ladders or a bunch of fiber cables from the other people using the building.
Anyway, ignoring the lacking quality of the journalism, more countries should do like Brazil and call slavery for what it is in legislation, instead of using euphemisms like "human trafficking".
At first I found interesting how you nitpick in irrelevant details while ignoring the bigger picture.
The point of the whole article is to use a single case to illustrate a bigger picture that you seem to deliberately oversee: abuse and exploitation of manual and unqualified workers.
But, then, I saw your Brazilian name and understood. Brazilian jingoism freaks out when Brazil "looks bad" to the world. It is a very common reaction among 3rd world countries. Indians, Pakistanis, Nigerians, etc are just like that too.
Senhor Jobim had to leave hastily for the horse race track, and has asked me to briefly tend to his hacker messages and Kubernetes before I prepare his afternoon coffee.
He regrets that you found his commentary as being picking of the nits, but says that the article itself didn't invite any much broader reflection on the subject matter. He also mentions that no amount of bad publicity could ever make Brazil look worse than their neighbours, meaning Argentina - as he has understood from your hacker name is your home country.
Further, the journalists exploits a crime in her agenda to ignite hatred between the races, instead of focusing on facts or trying to broaden the picture. A bigger picture could for example be that Brazilian law classifies as slavery such crimes as lawmakers and reporters in other countries are afraid to. Which has later been mentioned by other senhores hackers in this thread, for example regarding berry pickers in Sweden and Finland.
Lol, I liked the reply, congrats. It is stylish and well argued.
First, be respectful: I am Paranaense and we consider offensive to be called "Argentinean".
Second, my criticism on disrespect for manual labour is not directed towards Brazil in particular but towards most 3rd World countries, all over Latin America, Africa, Asia, Middle East and parts of Eastern Europe. I'd also stress that, in some but not all of these countries, this disrespect does have racial undertones.
Third, I agree that the article is not explicit in its thesis and is poor on facts. But I forgive it because it is journalism, not sociology or history. Journalism is entertainment, like movies or soap-operas; sociology and history are sciences. Entertainment aims at being easy, accessible and fun, science aims at being deep.
> Although the family has agreed to compensate her, Maria, who lived in near-total isolation and without contact with her relatives, will remain with her employers
What the fuck?
Why did the law need the family's "agreement"??
Why is nobody going to jail for imprisoning someone for 55 years??
Just going on what it says in the article, it may be difficult to prove that anyone specifically forbade her to leave or made threats to prevent her from leaving.
I have some insight into this as my ex ended up in a similar situation in Malaysia. Rich family, no free days, 5-22 work hours.
It took me a year to convince her that it was not ok. They took away her passport, phone, she wasn't allowed to go out without them. I was ready to help her but she did not want my help.
In the end I'm sure she had to pay her "employer" for breach of contract since she left early. I think she had less than $1000 saved from these 18 months of work.
The thing that made me angry the most is that the family was incredibly well off, yet thought they deserve a slave (or more than one) at home.
Sadly this kind of crap is also common in Arab countries like Dubai/UAE where the majority of "household help" is expats who get their passports seized and sometimes even beaten.
Probably the entire adult population gets away with hundreds of offenses per annum on average (judging by the total amount on the books).
Even the most law abiding and most humble decile of Brazilian adults probably still get away with dozens of offenses per annum. That nobody cares to enforce at all.
Selective enforcement allows those in power to corruptly select who to prosecute. Even though many (perhaps most) "have-nots" will "get away with it", selective enforcement disproportionately impacts the "have-nots" as they have no leverage.
> The concern is that Maria’s dependence on the exploiting family is so extreme that removing her abruptly, without a structured support network, could do more harm than good
What disgusting subhumans. They should rot in jail until they close their eyes.
Nobody can tell me that such a life is not exploiting and slavery.
They dont need to play stupid and pay a laughable amount of money for a destroyed life.
But thats how some people got rich...pretty disgusting.
Its a common occurrence for families to take in poor girls to do house work in exchange for food and lodging. And with the insidious nature of Brazilian racism, they will pretend that she is part of the family. They might even take her on vacations (to work, of course). If you grow up with this mentality it might even be hard for you to see the injustice. Brazil abolished slavery in 1888, the last country in the Americas to do so, decades after its neighbours. The slaves never got compensation but their owners did.
"It is" is a bit misleading.
I will say it was common up to the end of 70s and somewhat into the 80s. Common here I don't mean that every single person would have a "slave child" at home but you'd know someone or someone that knew someone who did it.
I am not saying it justify this horrible behaviour, but mostly as to say how much worse it could get. Some would just be "Cinderella" style abuse, but other would be physically and sexually abused.
Some reform of policies around de 90s cleared much of the evil practice.
I think by today standards, 99% of people knowing this would have denounced this much earlier. The fact it did not happen in this case is because this family is related to a powerful politician of the region.
Compensation they offer is too little and too disrespectful. It is basically 3 USD a week for the past half decade of forced work relationship. First, it would need to be at least 100x more than that and it would need to put this rubbish in form of people into jail for the rest of their lives.
I was repeatedly told in school that Brazil was the last country to abolish slavery, only to find out recently that places like UAE had not abolished slavery until 1967.
Most people I talk to don’t know that 80% of Russians were slaves until their emancipation in 1861, as well as a significant amount of Ukrainians, Belarusians, Latvians and Estonians. There were no reparations paid, in fact they had to continue working for free for generations to pay bankers for the same land they have been enslaved for. Then just after the former serfs finally paid their “debt” the Bolsheviks came and took it
They took the slavery / serf distinction seriously in the Slavic world. While the distinctions might have mattered in the 1800s, by any modern-slavery standard the serfs were slaves, as you rightly say.
Whatever we might now think with hindsight of the communist revolution in Russia, if ever there was a country primed for the peasants to rise up against the ruling class, it was Russia.
Russia might have been a land of art, music, dance and literature, but you were pretty fucked if you weren't in the 20%.
Not just Russia, the Kingdom of Hungary (which contained large parts of Central Europe) abolished serfdom only in 1848 (the Serfdom Patent of 1781 was not really respected in the hungarian part of Austrian Empire until then).
They likely had the qualifier, as does GP, that it was the last country "in the Americas."
As if they stopped... The whole middle east is a shit show in that regard.
And North Korea continues to show that literally nobody cares, really. Because if they did, at least that would've been prevent- or at least stopable with some concessions to China. The North Korean people would've at least been treated as humans if they became part of China and the NK dictator along with the whole government be executed.
I’m sorry but the current NK regime and the Kim family consolidating power is in large part due to American aggression indochina. The Korean War was more or less genocide on the part of the Americans and history would be different without Douglas MacArthur…
That's just fake history. The US didn't start the Korean war, they helped SK stand free of the oppression of the seriously evil NK government.
China then interfered because they didn't want a US aligned country at their border.
However there have been decades since the affair settled - and I stand by my opinion that if the US and by extension NATO cares whatsoever, they'd have just told China "we won't interfere as long as you free NK citizens into free people".
It would've not been perfect at all, but at least the horrendous reality they are in would've been prevented.
That's also somewhat fake history. The half of Korea under Syngman Rhee was almost as bad as the other half under Kim Il Sung, it's just that Rhee was "our son of a bitch" to quote Roosevelt while Kim was Stalin's son of a bitch. Rhee was just as keen to unite Korea using American blood as Kim was using Chinese blood.
And the American terror bombings of the north were the heaviest in history.
This is quite interesting, given the UAE was only formed in 1971, and their precursor states only agreed to form the UAE in 1968.
https://www.nytimes.com/1967/03/28/archives/saudi-arabian-sl...
> Slavery in the Arab world is a benign institution. Slaves are rarely used for industrial or agricultural labor. They are often treated as members of the family. Bright young slaves are educated and given positions of trust and are eventually freed. Mohammed Surur, the former Minister of Finance of Saudi Arabia, was born a slave. Two managers of one of Jidda's principal hotels were once slaves.
"last country to abolish slavery" vs. "last country to practice slavery"
Yeah, have you ever been to Dubai?
Slavery is "illegal".
I'm convinced that the absolute modernity is only a sideshow attraction for the ultra-wealthy to visit Dubai. The real show is the servants.
A family member stayed in a hotel in Dubai recently and on returning said how incredible the staff were and willing they were to help them, and my response was "no shit"
I went once. It feels like Disney Land but for the wealthy. I'll never go back, and I actually regret going to be honest. It's disgusting and it's right out in the open.
I was shocked to read how late even several prominent European countries abolished it. Most northern US states abolished slavery even before Britain, France, Portugal, and (especially) Spain did.
Serfdom wasn't legally abolished in Russia until 1861. Slavery was technically abolished in the late 1700s, but in some areas serfs were still bought and sold like chattel until the end of serfdom.
The Ottoman Empire legally abolished slavery in the 1880s, but there was still illicit yet tolerated slavery in Turkey into the 1930s.
I think in some areas of the Sahel chattel slavery may still exist as a practical matter. Mauritania didn't legally abolish chattel slavery until 1981, for example, but as in other areas it can take decades for reality to match the law, given the laws were often changed under international pressure rather than reflecting any change to the domestic social order.
Serfdom continued in practice in Russia for decades and often serfs became indebted to the landowners in a form of financial bondage that pretty much lasted until the Russian revolution, where...well things didn't get much better for them.
The fact that serfdom de-facto remained is one of the primary reasons Russia's industrialization lagged the rest of Europe for so long as factories didn't get the initial cheap labour. It was only finally fully picking up steam (pun not intended) when WW1 broke out.
> serfs became indebted to the landowners in a form of financial bondage that pretty much lasted until the Russian revolution, where...well things didn't get much better for them.
Exactly. Bolsheviks just changed the name from "serfdom" to "collective farms". Mandatory membership where members were not allowed an ID that enabled them to move inside the country and therefore were bound to the farm. The practice continued until the late 1970s.
And, today, in the whole middle east everyone, from governments to individual families, keep getting "embarassed" by having it turn that that they're "holding servants". And then it happens again. And again. And again. Daesh/IS "brought back" slavery (which is one reason bringing back terror brides, some of whom exploited slaves while in the middle east, is such a judicial nightmare. What do you do with a legally Australian girl, now a mother of 4, who lived for 2 years in Iraq, bought and sold slaves, exploited some them to "run the household", and killed/worked to death one of them?)
Slavery is abolished everywhere in the middle east ("except" Daesh/islamic state), and yet this keeps happening. Example after example after example:
https://www.hrw.org/news/2025/06/12/fifas-world-cup-ignores-...
https://www.freedomunited.org/news/repression-modern-slavery...
https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/Documents/HRBodies...
https://www.ohchr.org/en/stories/2014/12/domestic-servitude-...
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpw5v077nyjo
https://www.hrw.org/report/2016/07/13/i-was-sold/abuse-and-e...
https://www.hrw.org/news/2014/10/22/united-arab-emirates-tra...
https://www.hrw.org/report/2020/08/24/how-can-we-work-withou...
https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2017/11/libya-must-e...
Oh and the royal families keep getting caught in "even more embarrassing" incidents.
Here is Saudi Arabia having a royal murder a slave for perceived insults, then forcing UK governments to allow and forgive the murder (by taking nationals hostage then organizing a "prisoner swap")
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/9674420/Saudi-...
Or Qatar:
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20200619-qatar-prince-accu...
Or Iranian and Iraqi imams and mullahs selling children, girls, but apparently even including the occasional boy, into child prostitution, functioning as pimps and exploiters:
https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/Documents/Issues/W...
Frankly, these days it seems to be quite normal for countries to just sign whatever treaty anyone wants signed ... and just ignore it. Vilifying anyone calling them out on it as culturally insensitive and in all cases ignoring them.
The abolition of slavery in the US is unfortunately a more complicated story than most people are aware.
The 13th amendment removed the legal concept of slavery (except for convicts) but it was still not a crime to do slavery. Slavery changed shape many times over the years since the civil war (usually involving convicting black people under sham crimes and then selling them as debt slaves or forcing them to sign contracts that rendered them slaves under threat of being convicted for said sham crimes) and can only reasonably be said to have actually ended in the US after Pearl Harbour when concerns that it would be used as enemy propaganda caused the Justice Department to properly prosecute slave owners (see Circular 3591[1]).
The last chattel slave in the US was Alfred Irving[2] and he was released in late 1942. He was kept in chains and was permanently disfigured due to constant physical abuse from his owners. He died in 1960.
[3] is a very comprehensive video essay about the topic.
[1]: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Circular_No._3591 [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Irving_(former_slave) [3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4kI2h3iotA
This isn't very surprising.
The vast majority of slaves went to the New World, so that's where most of its effects were felt. Of the 12.5M people kidnapped from Africa, only ~9000 went to the Old World. It just wasn't as obvious of a problem in Europe itself.
An interesting side-effect of this is that a lot of European countries have two relevant dates: the first being the banning of slave trade, the second being the banning of slavery. For example, the UK prohibited any involvement in the Atlantic slave trade in 1807, but slavery in the UK itself was only abolished in 1833.
In addition muslim traders also exported as many as 17 million slaves to the coast of the Indian Ocean, the Middle East, and North Africa.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/1523100.stm
Abducted and enslaved? Doesn't kidnapping imply kids?
It doesn't imply kids (or napping). Nancy Guthrie is 84 https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/fbi-determine...
Oh. Yeah I thought it was slang language use but it seems like it is used for adults too over the board. I mainly wanted to point out that adults were victims also.
Serfdom was abolished in the Kingdom of France in 1315.
You'd be shocked how much of our "friends" in MENA still have legal slavery for non citizens. When an employer can legally confiscate someone's passport and one can only leave the country with their authorization, it is slavery.
I have no idea why we in the west consider that normal and look the other way... What am I saying, I know, oil & VC money...
Some of them also bring their Filipino, India, Nepali, or African slave maids in Europe and everybody looks the other way, they have too much money to be criticized...
They are so brazen about slavery they routinely sell their slaves on Instagram or Facebook ads, with copies such as "doesn't need much food","will sleep on the floor", "will work 20 hours a day"...
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-50228549
> "African worker, clean and smiley," said one listing. Another: "Nepalese who dares to ask for a day off."
> When speaking to the sellers, the undercover team frequently heard racist language. "Indians are the dirtiest," said one, describing a woman being advertised.
They are dehumanized at first place, but the level of racism in these places, on top of all that is shocking...
> When an employer can confiscate someone's passport and one can only leave the country with their authorization, it is slavery.
This happens in Europe as well.
It is not legal, but it is the only way the Scandinavian berry market works at all. You don’t even need a huge market for this to be allowed to happen. You just need _a_ market and workers that are desperate enough to be tricked.
On a side note: be VERY suspicious if you ever come across a situation, where person identified by a passport, does not keep (more exactly: control) it themselves. This is a big red flag you've encountered some sort of exploitative (and possibly illegal) situation. Please remember!
Quoting from my own passport:
"The bearer of this passport may pass it to a third party only if there is a statutory obligation to do so".
Denying the freedom of an employee to end a work relation with their employer & leave, does not pass that bar.
When visiting Egypt, the hotel took control of all the guests passport and only returned them at departure date. It is not the same as work relation, obviously, but I wonder how common that practice is in other tourist destinations.
It's incredibly unusual – I've not encountered that in any destination I've travelled to (including Egypt).
They'll usually make a photocopy of the passport during check-in, then immediately return it.
This is completely a figment of your imagination.
Passport confiscation is a common sign of modern slavery.
It's not legal. There are definitions of "Modern Slavery" and descriptions of the practices and warning signs because it is still an issue in contemporary times, including in Europe.https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c2kdg84zj4wo
No, it's real. Every year, there are several news articles about berry pickers being abused, at least here in Sweden (not sure about the other Scandinavian countries). Here's [0] just ONE of the myriad of articles I could find, but there are so, so, so many more (and even worse ones) [1].
[0]: (In Swedish) Berry entrepreneurs suspected of trafficking Thai nationals, (2025). https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/vasternorrland/barforetag-...
[1]: (In Swedish) Berry pickers (Topic). https://www.svt.se/nyheter/om/barplockare
Both are from SVT, the public broadcaster in Sweden.
Similar situation in Finland. There have only recently been some consequences for the berry companies and reforms are underway. The pickers would come mainly from Thailand with tourist visas. This year a majority of the visas have been denied and the berry companies are throwing tantrums.
They've been engaging in illegal price-fixing, too.
The difference is that in Sweden it happens but at least it's illegal. In Dubai there's nothing illegal about it and therefore much more widespread.
https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=435f366f-4279...
> Most northern US states abolished slavery even before Britain, France, Portugal, and (especially) Spain did
Sort of. France and England abolished slavery within their own territories before the US states did, but it did not extend to their colonies until later. France banned slavery within its home territory back in the 1300s (Free Soil Principle), but continued with slavery through its "Code Noir" (Black Code) in its colonies, where slavery was not permanently abolished until 1848 (it was abolished at the time of the French Revolution but then reinstated by Napoleon). England abolished slavery at home in the mid 1700s but not in its colonies until 1834.
(Like the US North, England and France had very small populations of Africans/others, so it was relatively painless and easy to ban slavery there, while continuing to accept slavery "elsewhere". For the US North "elsewhere" was the South, for England and France it was their colonies. Same principle though.)
Along the same lines, slavery of Catholics was forbidden in Europe all the way back in the Middle Ages. So it was acknowledged to be something bad, that Christians should not do to each other. But slavery of "infidels", heathen/pagan/Muslims/etc., was OK - and not only okay but sanctioned by Romanus Pontifex in the 1400s granting Portugal the authority to enslave "pagans" (basically all non-Europeans) along the coast of Africa. (Incidentally, as some Africans converted to Christianity, this posed a problem (they were no longer pagan and couldn't be enslaved), and so eventually it shifted to being about race and skin color rather than religion.)
I wonder if this position was taken from the Muslim slaver behavior who had been conquering/enslaving Christians for quite a while at that point. Especially as Spain was being taken back from Muslim colonizers at that time, and you have lands that had been under Muslim practices (enslaving non-muslims) now having the roles reversed but perhaps the engrained Islamic thought (only enslave non-believers) entrenched.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saqaliba
Correction: The US still has not abolished slavery.
It is still legal in the case of prisoners: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirteenth_Amendment_to_the_Un...
yes! which is _the_ driving factor behind the US prison system with its private prison labor facilities.
there is zero financial motivation for the state for prevention or rehab or any other activities to reduce imprisonment rates
did I mention disenfranchisement of the imprisoned?
Related: https://newjimcrow.com/about/excerpt-from-the-introduction
"Jarvious Cotton cannot vote. Like his father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and great-great-grandfather, he has been denied the right to participate in our electoral democracy"
Are you suggesting that the state turns a net profit on prisoners, making more from their labor than the full cost of their incarceration?
That seems…unlikely.
Not the state but the companies that run the prisons and those that contract the workers to work at an extremely low wage.
What’s the financial motivation for the state then?
For the state itself? None.
For state employees (i.e. representatives, judges, etc.)? Some get kickbacks.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal
See: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/dhs-contractors-told-wh...
Alas, the "kids for cash" scandal was such a big news event that it dominates the results for any search you'd do on the subject of private prison corruption, but it's hardly the only example.
It's possible that you're genuine in your confusion here; it is, however very hard for me to believe that there are people who genuinely don't understand that when the state spends money it -goes somewhere-.
The state as a whole does not have a financial motivation.
The interests of the criminal justice system on the other hand is heavily financially benefited from the current state of affairs. More incarcerations means more judges, more lawyers, more job security.
Moves to correct this are labeled as “soft of crime” and surely my opponent Congresswoman Y isn’t pro crime?
I wasn't claiming there was a financial motivation one way or the other simply stating the actors who do turn a profit with regards to the US prison system.
The explosion of incarceration and the private prisons resulting from that largely come from "the war on drugs". The book The New Jim Crow is pretty good if you're interested in the topic.
to lose less money on the prisoners?
i.e. its not a good motivation to increase the number of prisoners (even if one looses less money per prisoner, more prisoners will mean more loss), but it does motivate investigating ways on how one can minimize the loss on individual prisoners.
in many cases the motivation is not financial, it's racial; modern-day Jim Crow
Irrelevant. There doesn't need to be any.
"What's the financial motivation for the state" is way too blinkered and makes at least 2 different false assumptions. There are other motivations besides financial, and it doesn't have to be the state's own motivation for the state to end up doing something.
Countless government policies and programs exist which give no legitimate benefit to the state or the people, no legitimate motivation, financial or otherwise, yet they exist anyway because they do benefit and motivate someone, financially or otherwise, who has some mechanism of influence to cause it to happen.
This is almost like asking "Why would anyone do something bad?" Gosh golly why indeed? 517,000 reasons and 124 new ones every day.
Relevant in that the directly upthread poster argued there was “zero financial motivation for the state for prevention or rehab or any other activities to reduce imprisonment rates”, which I claim is incorrect.
I get how you could read it that way, and of course the state as the thing that is collecting taxes and paying whatever does not profit.
and the state as all citizens, including those affected by gang and drug related violence also would benefit from dong things differently.
it's those who benefit off the current prison labor system who lobby to keep it running, and they make it seem "natural" and "without alternatives"...
and "the state" (as the tax collecting entity) pays for the prisons and the inmates while the labor "providing" companies benefit off the labor.
it's a very very clever system.
enslavement without being called such.
and I agree, no, "the state" (as the totality of citizens) doesn't benefit.
only "the state" as the entity that's controlled by lobbyists and _pretends_ being by the people, for the people, that has no motivation to change this.
Prisoners are not slaves, because they are not the property of the prison or any other entity. It's called involuntary servitude. I'm sure the people affected do not care about the distinction, but words matter.
It's also trivially easy to not end up in involuntary servitude.
> It's also trivially easy to not end up in involuntary servitude.
Look, you're not entirely wrong. But you're not entirely right, either.
In some states, the prisons are privately run and the prison labour is part of the profit motive. They have no incentive to rehabilitate and the states with these "programs" have some of the highest recidivism rates in the USA.
That also ignores the fact that some people are born into situations that make it far harder to live a "legit" life than others, and I'm not even talking about historical racism as part of that equation (which certainly does contribute).
I'm also NOT saying that prisoners shouldn't be made to work, but it should be outside of a system designed to exploit them.
> It's also trivially easy to not end up in involuntary servitude.
Stupid people always say nonsense like this as if no person in prison is innocent.
It's also black and white thinking that carries an ego-filled, nuance-lacking, disregard for the myriad of circumstances that underpin human behavior.
Stupid people also assume there are not exceptions to every rule. But you can't build your systems (or your arguments) around edge cases, because that would be ignoring the vast majority of use cases.
Another stupid comment. What do you think about the death penalty?
If you happen to be the one dying for no reason would you consider that just a trivial unfortunate edge case?
Educate yourself:
https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/policy-issues/policy/innocence
Every day I am happy many here are techies and not politicians.
I did not say that prisoners are slaves. I said that it is legal to enslave them.
You should read The New Jim Crow
I suppose using this logic, murder is legal, because of self defense. Theft is legal because of tax laws.
Prisoners aren't 'slaves'. They are being punished for crimes they committed. Very dofferent than being born into it and bought/sold to the highest bidder.
Read the Constitution. The 13th amendment that “abolished” slavery also explicitly reserved the right for the government to keep prisoners as slaves:
AMENDMENT XIII
Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
> They are being punished for crimes they committed
The punishment is being locked up in a cell. Being forced to work on top of that is the slavery.
> Being forced to work on top of that is the slavery.
Why is it not part of the punishment?
I think it is dependent upon interpretation. Otherwise arresting and locking up can be interpreted as kidnapping and so on.
I do agree that they should be fairly compensated though.
> Why is it not part of the punishment?
Indeed it is part of the punishment. As an earlier comment in this thread points out from the 13th amendment:
> "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime" (emphasis added by me)
> I do agree that they should be fairly compensated though.
They're not. That's why it's slavery. And slavery of prisoners is permitted by the Constitution, which is the main point here.
If someone is abducted against their will and forced to do work without (fair) compensation and without being allowed to exercise their human rights, is that person not a slave because they were neither born into it nor bought or sold?
"Abduction against their will" is something that happens when a person is arrested. If you are done for crime I don't think freedoms apply to you anymore.
I did not say that all prisoners are slaves. I said that it would be legal to enslave them.
Self denese isn't murder. It's killing but not murder. And yes, there are forms of killing that are legal and not murder.
And yes indeed you are correct that the sate does commit theft and declare it legal for itself.
Prisoners that are made to perform any useful work that anyone else benefits from are slaves, not merely prisoners.
If you want to invoke the word "logic" you should actually employ it.
"Common" occurrence? I've literally never seen literal slavery like this happen before.
> they will pretend that she is part of the family
Wasn't there some mild scandal a decade or so ago where wealthy white American families would adopt kids from Africa or Mexico, only to force them to do housework the whole time?
https://www.courts.wa.gov/opinions/pdf/774166.pdf
Well, it's classed as child abuse and the perpetrators ("parents") were punished harshly. So pretty bad, but not remotely the same thing as what happens in the middle east or north Africa.
Not Brazil — Mexico — but the movie Roma does an amazing job at dissecting this sort of dynamic.
If you found that movie interesting, check out The Second Mother (Que Horas ela Volta?) which is a Brazilian movie about a maid and her relationship with the middle class family that employs her.
Thank you! Putting it on the watchlist.
“The oppressors left, but their systems remain”
I was talking to a doctor who went to medical school in Brazil and said it was normal for upper-middle class people to have a live-in domestic servant. Many of the floorplans for condos or houses include a servants quarters. They were telling me theirs cost around $12 USD a day which is not a bad deal.
This is true in Singapore and Malaysia, as well, where Filipino or Indonesian cooks and housekeepers are extremely common, as are separate entrances--typically into the kitchen. In Malaysia there's an odd situation, the reverse of the dynamic in the US, where Indonesian servant immigration is encouraged as a way to grow the Muslim population and help diminish the political power of Chinese-Malaysians and Indian-Malaysians.
> This is true in Singapore and Malaysia, as well, where Filipino or Indonesian cooks and housekeepers are extremely common, as are separate entrances--typically into the kitchen.
Live in housekeepers are very common indeed in Singapore. However, majority of Singapore lives in Housing Development Board flats that do not have any separate entrance into kitchen.
I am a brazilian doctor. Yeah, richer people are very likely to hire staff to manage their homes. It's not a rule, but it's not rare for them to live in the house they work at. This is common enough to show up as a trope in popular telenovelas.
I've yet to uncover a case of literal slavery like TFA though. One could argue the workers aren't getting paid enough and I'd agree, but the workers are getting paid.
It is very common for the worker to not get paid. A place to sleep and food is not payment, enslaved people also got it.
"Very common" ? No. You make it sound like you can find literally enslaved people in random brazilian households.
Not anymore, since the 2002 this changed and it wasn't easy.
It was very, very common before that tho. We shouldn't forget so to not repeat.
If you pay minimum wage (about US$300) it would be about that per working day. Increasingly, cleaners are working per diem because they earn a lot more (about US$40 a day, but this varies a lot by region).
The downside is that they get no benefits.
I grew up with servants (in Subsaharan Africa and Morocco).
However, they were paid (I have no idea whether it was a good wage, or not), and had pretty decent quarters (in Morocco). My parents were pretty kind, fairly liberal, people. I would be quite surprised (and shocked) if they took advantage of the servants. I know that my mother made damn sure that I had respect for poor folks.
Those things are a symptom of an undeveloped economy. It harkens back to a time of less development where there were more hands than jobs and much of the labor was manual. Not to excuse the practice in modern times but go back a few generations and that was the reality of the world -everywhere.
It's a symptom of inequality. It will start happening more and more even in the first world if inequality isn't tackled and wealth continues to concentrate.
Why do you see inequality as the problem, instead of poverty?
Logically-speaking, poverty can't exist without inequality. It's a condition of "want" that requires others to "have".
Practically-speaking, inequality is insidious because it enables violations of rights and unjust denial of opportunity even when poverty has been eradicated. Cold comfort, to the middle-class family of people mowed down by a rich motorist who faces negligible jail time because the money they can spend on a lawyer is outside the scope of what the legal system is built to handle.
There's poverty without inequality. In some primitive tribes everyone was poor. When natural adverse conditions hit some regions, also poverty was widespread.
That the justice can be persuaded in a certain direction with money is a weakness of the system. I don't think you would consider equal and just that every person could influence justice. The problem is the justice system.
If everyone is poor, there's no poverty, just an ubiquitous state of subsistence. Poverty is always relative to some existing state of abundance.
>That the justice can be persuaded in a certain direction with money is a weakness of the system
It's a weakness of any system with overbearing inequality. Equal societies don't face this issue to the same extent because those wronged can mount an equal defense or offense as those doing the wrong, at which point righteousness should prevail.
You redefined the word poverty there, that's not the common or dictionary definition.
Even with wealth equality, as long as there's scarcity, some people would try to gain advantages over others with means different than money: e.g advantageous connections with others, deception, etc. There's corruption among poor people, and rich people also steal from other rich people.
An utopic idea of equality blocks the capacity of observing how things work.
No. Poverty is not relative to what others have. Poverty is relative to baseline needs. So poverty absolutely can exist without inequality.
Inequality has no moral characteristics. It is not "insidious." The fact that disparate effort and disparate circumstance lead to disparate outcomes is just that; a simple cold fact.
That some people use their power or wealth to take advantage of others is a moral issue. But again, this is orthogonal to disparity of outcome. Or do you claim poor people never steal from other poor people, or that rich people never steal from other rich people?
Envy is not the basis of poverty, need is.
That's incorrect. The baseline need that poverty is calculated relative to is itself calculated relative to local conditions. Because inequality drives those local conditions, poverty cannot exist without it.
Your post is proof of the insidiousness of inequality. It allows for outcomes to be warped by the presence or lack of aggregated capital, without presenting a direct attack on outcomes. As long as you are able to limit the contextual scope, you are able to claim a "just world", even when clear injustice is extant.
It is then important to insist that the scope stay broad enough to involve all related implications.
"Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely." This suggests that there is a functional relationship between the size of power imbalances and the amount of corruption that exists. It is not that some people use their power or wealth to take advantage of others; it is that inordinate power and wealth ensures that abuses will occur.
> Because inequality drives those local conditions...
That is not in evidence. You may be thinking of inflationary pressures causing the poverty income level to be adjusted upward. This is not a result of income inequality. It is a result of supply and demand.
> "Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely."
That is an aphorism, not a universal truth, and holds zero moral weight. You may be judged as corrupt by what you do, not by what you have.
> ...inordinate power and wealth ensures that abuses will occur.
No. This is envy as evidence. It doesn't work that way. Your use of the word "inordinate" is also meaningless from an economic or policy stance. Who decides what is inordinate? What qualifies a level as inordinate?
There is only one equilibrium state with full equality: vacuum. In an economic sense this is where zero exchange of value occurs. It is system-death.
In a just world, you keep what you earn. You reap what you sow. When someone powerful steps out of line you punish them. If they do not, there is no reason to punish them. Pre-punishment because "they probably will" is propaganda from the dictator. We don't want that.
Most countries we are discussing are richer now than a few decades ago, yet still have domestic servants.
Those servants will be richer in a few decades but will still be in that situation.
Then I think that terrible labor laws are the main problem, not inequality
The terrible labor laws exist because of the inequality. The people with servants write the laws and, in their magnaminity, don't let the servants vote.
You are writing about democratic countries. Everyone votes. I sense that you're pointing to a different problem.
Even in democracies, voting can be distorted. Gerrymandering, lobbying, revolving doors, plain old bribes, etc.
So, corruption is the problem, not inequality.
Corruption is a enabled by inequality.
There is rich people that steal from rich people. There are many cases of corruption where poverty is not a factor.
Inequality is a big factor. Story says the woman in this case felt she was compensated. Like feeling 'lucky' to enjoy (some) perks of living in a rich household. If that family had been as poor as her (or her mother), that stops being true. Then it becomes hard to keep a slave from walking away without resorting to violence.
Another big factor is the victim simply not knowing any better. Not being able to read might have helped with that (and I'd guess she probably wasn't allowed a phone, to keep her isolated from outside).
Point is there's a lot of space between "whips & chains" and "paying below minimum wage". Unfortunately some people are really good at exploiting that space.
Your first paragraph says that poverty makes people accept things they wouldn't if they had more money. Poverty is the problem there.
Education and a society's culture are certainly important too.
Yes poverty is a factor. But inequality too - it helps to create [the powerless vs the powerful] situations. Even if those on the bottom may not qualify as poor.
> Education and a society's culture are certainly important too.
Agreed.
In the powerless VS powerful situation, taking aside poverty, what do you mean? The powerful manipulating the justice system with money?
> The powerful manipulating the justice system with money?
That's a good example. Curtailing voter rights is another. And then there's money -> influence on media.
Because exploitation is a two-actor system and poverty is a unary operator.
That two actor system needs an poor person to exploit. You are confirming my statement that poverty is the main problem.
And you need a rich person to do the exploiting. The power differential is a key ingredient.
What's your definition of exploitation?
There's is poor people who exploit other poor people. Poor people that sends children to work for example. Only the rich can exploit? You are not using the definition of exploitation from the dictionaries. A stronger or armed person has a power differential with a weaker person. A smarter and less smart person too.
So, exploitation doesn't seem to be related exclusively to wealth inequality. It's a moral thing, not a matter of wealth differences.
A simple narrative of "us-good VS them-bad" is reductionistic.
Because they go together.
The hallmark of developed countries is that they're even, mostly egalitarian and developed everywhere.
The hallmark of developing or underdeveloped countries is precisely the staggering levels of inequality.
Not everyone is poor in a developing/underdeveloped country. Quite a few people there live lives that would make upper middle classes in developed countries blush. Life "just" sucks for the majority of people there.
> The hallmark of developed countries is that they're even, mostly egalitarian and developed everywhere.
Nope:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_we...
Developed-but-very-unequal, and less-developed-but-more-equal are a thing.
Wealth is a lagging indicator.
Also, I have my own standard (https://xkcd.com/927/):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient
Many underdeveloped African countries have low Gini.
Do you prefer perfect equality in poverty, or some inequality and some wealth, a mixture of coexisting inequality and wealth.
Correlation is not causation.
Would you say USA is a developed country, considering for example Los Angeles slums? And there's a bigger inequality between Elon musk and a well paid software developer than between a poor person in a developing country and a rich politician from that country.
> Would you say USA is a developed country
I'm not saying anything (directly). We have definitions for these things:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developed_country
According to any way we currently categorize developed countries, the US is one of them.
Acording to what you say:
- "The hallmark of developed countries is that they're even, mostly egalitarian and developed everywhere."
- "they go together" (poverty and inequality).
- The US is a developed country.
- The US has a great wealth inequality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_we...
What you say implies contradictions.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48884765
>$12 USD a day which is not a bad deal
For the owner or the servant?
probably for both.. don't forget it includes an air conditioned place to live, food and internet plus a salary. In exchange they take care of domestic needs (cooking, shopping, house keeping)
Not a bad deal for who?
This used to be quite common in Chile as well. I don't think it's that prevalent anymore, but it was very interesting to see the synergy some families built after decades of cohabiting with a "service person" (don't really know what word to use). I met a lot of people that widely regarded their service lady as a mother, they were pretty much raised with them around, so the bonds run deep. I have no doubt some times the compensation might not exactly be the best, but I have met quite a lot of people that are well happy with this arrangement.
The median income in brazil is 10X lower than USA. So $12 a day -> $120 a day. That's similar to what someone in the US at the bottom of the economic ladder might earn. We have the same thing, it's just that Americans want to have servants but don't want to see them, so there's an app barrier between you and the poor. Someone cooks your food, someone else delivers your food, someone cleans your hotel room, but Americans prefer not to have to ever learn their names or talk to them. Is that really better?
Unlike when you use an app, for the most part, because we're not psychopaths, living with someone every day for months or years causes us to feel a great affinity and care towards them.
I live in a developing country. Some people treat their live-in staff badly. But for many others, this is not the case.
Imagine you are a high-earner and hard worker and so you and your wife get a live-in nanny to assist with childrearing duties. Often, two or three decades later, the live-in nanny is ready to retire, but your children (whom you love) have come to see her as a member of the family, or even as a second mother. Surely you also do. How can you live with someone for 20-30 years and not care about them? You might thus often take care of her for the rest of her life, even though she has her own savings.
(No, I do not have live-in house staff. But I've had the same maid for 7 years and she knows she can come to me if she needs anything.)
How one treats someone else is probably mostly just a reflection of the individual. But it's harder to disregard someone's humanity when they live in your house and you've know them for years.
This is probably the same line of thought the families involved in the story have had.
Yet, the end result is still quite similar to slavery. Why do you suppose the servants stay, instead of living a life of their own? I think you’ll find the answer there.
There is a world of difference between paying someone who is free to leave, and basically fake adopting a child who you keep uneducated so that they don’t even know how to leave while forcing them to work without any pay.
Are you saying if they were simply paid slightly more money and forced to seek their own food and shelter in whatever abject conditions they could afford, like minimum-wage and rural workers in most first-world countries, they would be better off? Or do you have more insightful suggestions? “Pay more” is always the easy answer people go with, especially while not wanting to pay more for anything, so I’m excited to hear a fresh and unique take on poverty.
I'd say certainly not. The key aspect of the story is that the woman entered in service of the family as a very young child. That makes all the difference.
Thanks for your perspective. I do wonder if this arrangement is usually not as bad as some people are implying. Though on the other hand, the line between this sort of thing and something that can reasonably be called slavery can be quite fuzzy.
The practice of live-in maids has been somewhat common throughout the world up until WWI and into WWII. Well-to-do families would taken in boys and girls from poor families and use them for house and yard work. It wasn’t slavery, or even indentured servitudes, but it did take opportunity of their misfortune. Aristocrats and well to dos would take girls and boys mostly from the less educated countryside or from war-torn areas of the rest of Europe and use them as cheap labor. Some would stay on and some would go off to seek better future outside those families. It was somewhat symbiotic the poor kids (and their families) needed the money and the wealthy could show off they had money to spend on domestic help.
My wife's family were wealthy Chinese near Hong Kong. Her grandmother took in a poor girl as a servant. She was part of the family but also basically a slave. The grandmother arranged her marriage when the girl was older. We met the girls granddaughter when we visited china - she was a new college student. The two families still think of themselves as related.
Almost same story (except china), my grandmother lost her parents very young. A family took her in and she worked for them until 20 years old or something then she got married.
$40k compensation for 55 years of service...
In cases like this, it’s likely the victim defended the family, and it made it impossible to classify the crime as slavery if she said she was free to leave but “was afraid of the violence outside”, which the article mentioned. It sounds ridiculous but in any court, if you can’t prove something beyond doubt, you cannot punish, which I think is why they ended up with that arrangement.
If you ever been to or lived in Fortaleza, "being afraid of the violence outside" is not ridiculous at all.
But being so afraid that you have never been outside unless accompanied by your bosses would be pathological in any other case. Also, what I said was "ridiculous" was the jury's conclusion, not going outside.
Pathological, yes, but it doesn't necessarily mean that this fear was instilled by the family as a way to keep her trapped.
Most people in Brazil are so used with the precautions that they have to take to deal with urban violence, they don't get to realize that they are the ones living in their own prisons. I have family members in Rio de Janeiro who get panic attacks at the thought of going anywhere by themselves. I've met grown-up, educated, independent people in college who wouldn't dare to do anything outside of the home <-> campus itinerary on their own.
Minimum wage is about US$300, which would make about US$220k total (you get about 13.3 salaries per year), plus fines and overtime. They'll have to pay social security too. It seems to me that the case doesn't include the labour part of the situation. That might be a separate case.
> “The signing of this agreement does not rule out the possibility that the worker may pursue individual claims through the courts,” the statement added.
So not only but a start.
systemic racism is a thing, bet you there are judges, lawyers, etc that have the same thing going on. many in power do and thus are sympathetic to such causes. it's hard to viciously go after what you are guilt of.
The crime done here is nearly death penalty levels. Nearly. Jail time for the entire family or stripped of all wealth.
Maybe public humiliation is better, release names and address.
You are acting like the case is that the girl was kidnapped or taken from their family against their will. Barring extraordinary circumstances, this is far from the truth here. More likely than not, this is the case of some poor family that couldn't take care of the girl and gave her away.
It is a horrible arrangement, and she should be given a lot more than what she is getting (at the very least, she should be given backpay + pension equivalent to the market rate of her work for all these years), but to treat this case as some sadistic family keeping someone in captivity is overreacting.
maybe.. but it's very close to "sadistic family". It's very very close. It wasn't slavery, but excruciating close to slavery.
And definitely the punishment given is a complete under-reaction and your attempt here to lighten the situation lightens it way too much.
If it was as bad as you are claiming it to be, she wouldn't stay with the family before the investigation, yet everyone deemed better to let her stay with the family even after the sentence was given.
It's the same reason why a lot of wives who have spent years being abused and beaten by husbands end up still staying with their husband.
Maybe this is a sensitive topic for you, but try not reading more into the article than it's there. The decision was recommended by the social workers.
No it's not. I can see how it's recommended. It's the best possible decision for the victim. But the scale of the crime is still horrible.
I wouldn't pin judgement on someone elses recommendation nor would I say them being a social worker validates it even more than say some rando guy on the internet. Judge the facts.
Her life was ruined. That is huge. It is an epic crime. Not a mild thing.
See also the late Alex Tizon's "My Family's Slave" https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/06/lolas-s... , with a 2017 HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14350059 .
Oh wow, I didn't realize this was already 9 years old. One of the essays of all time.
Certainly provides some perspective on why Brazil might let that woman stay with the family that enslaved her. Granted, Lola's case is unique because she was taken halfway around the world and was an undocumented immigrant for decades. It sounds like that's not the case for this woman in Brazil, but there's a lot we don't know.
I've seen what might be a similar social dynamic in very long, but abusive marriages in the US. A person can understand intellectually that they could have a better life elsewhere, but this has been their life for so long that conceiving of what that life might be like is impossible, or terrifying at best. I resent the abuser no less, but it's hard to know what to make of all of it.
Thanks for unearthing this, it was immediately what came to mind when I saw this headline and read some of the discussion.
I’m new to HN. How does this relate to the theme of Hacker News?
Those of us that soldered wires, wrote custom drivers for esoteric hardware, and played with crazy things in the garage recognize that social systems are hackable too.
Submitter here. As per HN guidelines: "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity".
This playing out across generations of the family that kept her, the woman 'rescued' but staying with them for the time being, the social context, income levels, how to keep a slave from leaving in today's ultra-connected world, the low $ damages mentioned, relation with other modern forms of slavery...
Plenty to go on there. Btw welcome to HN!
Interesting no doubt!
Anything that is interesting. It’s not all just tech here.
Read this https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Despite the other comments attempting to expand the scope of "hacking" or general interest to pretty much anything, it doesn't.
On-topic is described as anything that is interesting. And off-topic is described as typical news that doesnt have interesting implications.
You’re doing great so far; keep making more comments like this and you’ll fit right in
Welcome to HN! You’ll find that a lot of the readers and commenters here don’t view technology as an isolated field, that it interconnects with all sorts of other systems—sociology, politics, entertainment, manufacturing, business, and so on.
Welcome to Hacker News. Such submissions are mostly not on-topic according to the HN guidelines linked at the bottom of the page but there are persistent activist users who try to drag off-topic social issues onto Hacker News when the opportunity presents itself under the thin pretext that "everything is political". Most such submissions don't have the momentum to reach the HN front page but occasionally one does.
The joke's on them; it likely erodes support for their causes.
at the bottom of the page there is guidelines and FAQ
they also give good indication on how to handle topics that don't tickle your personal preferences (for "interesting" or "curious"): silently ignore them
especially if interest is the guidance on downvoting and flagging. the sorting is not according to your personal preferences, as in "social media", but according to the hn hive think. thus negative voting indicates "anti-curious", "anti-conversation", not dislike.
Yup, my mom and her sisters were all sent off to work on family houses when they were about 10 - 12. They were born in the country side, and my grandpa didn't care for them at all.
Did they also eventually win their freedom like in the article?
Yes. She left that house to work on a nursery home with the nuns. Then on a supermarket, I think. Then my father knocked her up at the age of 20. Interesting woman.
I see a lot of comments claiming that slavery was abolished. It was not, we just made the transition to another form of slavery, one where most people think they are free. In reality, they work every day while most of their earnings are taken from them by force every month ('taxation'). The well known slave Frederik Douglas was one of the first examples of this. Douglas made a deal with his master to do whatever he liked as long as he gave his master a cut. The same dynamic is now implemented worldwide. Watch the movie Jones Plantation. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt26964727/
Well, taxation is not “most of your earnings.” Not even remotely close. If we’re talking theft, maybe look at the companies reaping profits off your labor without sharing it.
I think your definition of slavery is highly insulting. Slavery is bad not because two people agree to have this profit sharing scheme as you seem to be implying.
Slavery is evil because one person is nearly fully and entirely controlling another person’s entire life, usually for the “owner’s” gain, without the other person’s consent.
Isnt taxation evetually more than half of your earnings? Eventually close to 70 or 80 percent. Depending on what plantation you live
Claiming (twice) that taxation takes most of your earnings is not the same as proving it. We didn't believe you the first time, and we don't believe you the second. Got any actual evidence?
I dunno about proving, but 20% income tax + 20% vat + property taxes + estate tax + the various extra taxed thing like gas etc, and you're easily over half.
Try 40% income tax
She will re receive a compensation of 50.000 reais. Which on every, with current exchange rate should be about 3 USD per week of work. One can't get a better bargain for a slave!
I hoped the article would mention whether the woman desires to be "rescued" or wants changes in the way she lives now.
Something, something, Plato's allegory of the cave.
> whether the woman desires to be "rescued" or wants changes in the way she lives now
Here’s the thing: you can’t keep someone isolated for 55 years, working them without pay—regardless of whether the victim thinks that they want it or not.
Oh the caste system of the west
A similar history, in the U.S.: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/06/lolas-s...
Hot take: As bad as this is, I wonder if it would be kinder to leave her with the family for the rest of her life.
This lady is in her 60s, does she even know any other way to even live? Life with that family may be better than whatever Brazil's equivalent of welfare shelters are.
Seems like that may have been why the case workers left her with that family for now.
If they pay her what she’s owed and the damages. She can get her place, hire people and pay them to care of her or help her.
The problem that often the victims also have not educated, have no worldly experience, often have no idea about money handeling beyond small items.
This can result in them being exploited again by even more unscrupulous people. The articles clearly mentioned how difficult these cases are to deal with. While they do not go into detail, the above is why.
Its very easy to gain peoples trust when they have no sense of normal anymore, and can you sign this paper, o, we need to go to a friendly notary to help with it. and before you know it, the people just handed over their apartment / or whatever.
There are a lot of good people with will want to help but it only takes one rotten apple to destroy peoples live again. Recently in Europe there was a case of a helper that took elderly their IDs and helped herself to their money. She made 100s of victims. Now imaging that type of person with somebody who probably did not have any proper education and normal independent life experiences that we all had the luxury of having.
In a ideal world, we have proper state funded solutions, with proper oversight to help people integrate into society. Reality is that if any services exist, they are underfunded, often lacking oversight and people fall into the often chasm of cracks.
These type of stories are never clean white and black, but a mix of gray sludge, where we all hope for the perfect ideal solution but often there are not many options. And naivety tend to often do more harm then good.
If she hires people doesn't that just perpetuate the problem?
Hire not enslave! Like how you might hire a driver, or housemaid, or anyone to do a salaried or contract job? How does that perpetuates the problem?
I'm pretty sure there's a reason we frown on people hiring servants in general, such as a driver or a housemaid. It's far too similar to slavery for anyone's comfort
Do also frown upon people working in nursing homes? Or your uber driver? No one frowns upon the people who work/help people who need it.
If I had a guess, the family got rid off her the easy way when she was old, they saved themselves a lot of money.
No, if they wanted to get rid of her there were a lot of easier solutions. As you may be aware, slaves can be sold.
"Statistics suggest that Maria was undoubtedly poor and, most likely, Black."
That is a new way of reporting news, that journalist Gortázar seems to have invented here. When you don't know anything about the victim, just make something up from "statistics".
Where else can we apply this technique?
"Maria entered their lives around 1971 — the year Henry Kissinger visited China, John Lennon wrote Imagine, and Mexico hosted the first Women’s World Cup."
Good to know.
"The traditional maid’s room is gradually disappearing in Brazil, but buildings with separate social and service elevators — for domestic workers, visiting technicians, neighbors with dogs, or residents carrying groceries — remain commonplace."
Those are for separating workers carrying broken dusty floor tiles or ladders or a bunch of fiber cables from the other people using the building.
Anyway, ignoring the lacking quality of the journalism, more countries should do like Brazil and call slavery for what it is in legislation, instead of using euphemisms like "human trafficking".
At first I found interesting how you nitpick in irrelevant details while ignoring the bigger picture.
The point of the whole article is to use a single case to illustrate a bigger picture that you seem to deliberately oversee: abuse and exploitation of manual and unqualified workers.
But, then, I saw your Brazilian name and understood. Brazilian jingoism freaks out when Brazil "looks bad" to the world. It is a very common reaction among 3rd world countries. Indians, Pakistanis, Nigerians, etc are just like that too.
Dear Diego,
Senhor Jobim had to leave hastily for the horse race track, and has asked me to briefly tend to his hacker messages and Kubernetes before I prepare his afternoon coffee.
He regrets that you found his commentary as being picking of the nits, but says that the article itself didn't invite any much broader reflection on the subject matter. He also mentions that no amount of bad publicity could ever make Brazil look worse than their neighbours, meaning Argentina - as he has understood from your hacker name is your home country.
Further, the journalists exploits a crime in her agenda to ignite hatred between the races, instead of focusing on facts or trying to broaden the picture. A bigger picture could for example be that Brazilian law classifies as slavery such crimes as lawmakers and reporters in other countries are afraid to. Which has later been mentioned by other senhores hackers in this thread, for example regarding berry pickers in Sweden and Finland.
He sends you his latest composition, for your enjoyment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGO44D-hMmQ
Lol, I liked the reply, congrats. It is stylish and well argued.
First, be respectful: I am Paranaense and we consider offensive to be called "Argentinean".
Second, my criticism on disrespect for manual labour is not directed towards Brazil in particular but towards most 3rd World countries, all over Latin America, Africa, Asia, Middle East and parts of Eastern Europe. I'd also stress that, in some but not all of these countries, this disrespect does have racial undertones.
Third, I agree that the article is not explicit in its thesis and is poor on facts. But I forgive it because it is journalism, not sociology or history. Journalism is entertainment, like movies or soap-operas; sociology and history are sciences. Entertainment aims at being easy, accessible and fun, science aims at being deep.
Fourth, I think "your" best composition is not the one you linked, but this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qttuCR18NMU
> Although the family has agreed to compensate her, Maria, who lived in near-total isolation and without contact with her relatives, will remain with her employers
What the fuck?
Why did the law need the family's "agreement"??
Why is nobody going to jail for imprisoning someone for 55 years??
Just going on what it says in the article, it may be difficult to prove that anyone specifically forbade her to leave or made threats to prevent her from leaving.
I have some insight into this as my ex ended up in a similar situation in Malaysia. Rich family, no free days, 5-22 work hours.
It took me a year to convince her that it was not ok. They took away her passport, phone, she wasn't allowed to go out without them. I was ready to help her but she did not want my help.
In the end I'm sure she had to pay her "employer" for breach of contract since she left early. I think she had less than $1000 saved from these 18 months of work.
The thing that made me angry the most is that the family was incredibly well off, yet thought they deserve a slave (or more than one) at home.
Sadly this kind of crap is also common in Arab countries like Dubai/UAE where the majority of "household help" is expats who get their passports seized and sometimes even beaten.
In Brazil there are so many laws, I heard that nearly 100% of the population treats laws like strongly worded suggestions, at best.
Idk how the prosecution system even functions without credibility.
If it operates like most corrupt systems, it binds the have-nots, but not the haves.
How can this be true?
Probably the entire adult population gets away with hundreds of offenses per annum on average (judging by the total amount on the books).
Even the most law abiding and most humble decile of Brazilian adults probably still get away with dozens of offenses per annum. That nobody cares to enforce at all.
Huh?
Did you not understand what it means for even the most humble adult to be getting away with dozens of offenses per annum?
It clearly is not binding on the “have-nots” either.
Of course there is selective enforcement of some % of laws on the books, that’s true in every country on Earth.
Selective enforcement allows those in power to corruptly select who to prosecute. Even though many (perhaps most) "have-nots" will "get away with it", selective enforcement disproportionately impacts the "have-nots" as they have no leverage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_enforcement
https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/law/police-corruptio...
I know? I was the one who wrote that there could be hundreds on average, and dozens for a smaller subset.
That already implies a huge variation.
Edit: But it still doesn’t “bind” anyone in Brazil in the strict sense. At most, it goes from very loose to extremely loose.
It's the usual "criminalize everyone then selectively enforce when politically convenient" corruption.
> The concern is that Maria’s dependence on the exploiting family is so extreme that removing her abruptly, without a structured support network, could do more harm than good
From the article.
What disgusting subhumans. They should rot in jail until they close their eyes. Nobody can tell me that such a life is not exploiting and slavery. They dont need to play stupid and pay a laughable amount of money for a destroyed life. But thats how some people got rich...pretty disgusting.
I’m not quite how this relates to tech, hackernews or startups